Time has distracted you away, it has,
But memory is not just a patch of mountains
Whose small pockets hide the stuff of secret peaks:
Sharply woven knots, the weave of a voice that speaks
In thin strands returning beneath your fingers,
Yesterday’s map in braille that lingers

Like a sudden appearance from across shrouded hills.
No: memory is not just the sound of mountains,
An architect’s design borne in twilight hours
Where trees breathe superstitions, where there’s
A fleeing gust that reveals the splash of years
Against the day, and memory works its fears.

It’s of the bird call
The bruising of wind, the pasted clouds, the promise of mountains
On a plane that curves infinitely backwards
the way years seem to bend over themselves
in a constant recurrence of voices
and objects and places and dreams
dredged up from the bottomless sea of ourselves
we wished to vault over once.

But now, again, the birds call,
The years move under us.
(1 January 2016)